Unemployment Hodge-Podge: Government Struggling to Help Families Applying for Aid for First Time
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on May 11, 2009
By Vicki McClure Davidson * Frugal Café Blog Zone
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For March, according to the most current numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the state of Michigan is now at 12.6% unemployment, Oregon is at 12.1%, California is at 11.2%, South Carolina is at 11.4%, North Carolina is at 10.8%, Rhode Island is at 10.5%, Nevada is at 10.4%, and Indiana is at 10.0%. A few states are in much better shape: North Dakota is at 4.2% unemployment, Nebraska at 4.6%, South Dakota at 4.9%, Iowa and Utah are at 5.2%, and Louisiana at 5.8%.
With unemployment numbers hitting a high not seen in more than three decades, American families that have always been able to take care of themselves financially are now reluctantly turning to the government for assistance for the very first time.
Even more frustrating, many are learning that in addition to being victims of this shaky economy and company downsizing, they are now also victims of the government’s hodge podge process of applying for help.
Frustrating, disjointed benefit programs are rejecting many eligible families or letting them fall through the cracks for inconsistent reasons. These people are searching for Obama’s promised “safety net” and finding bureaucratic red tape and heartache instead.
A portion of the New York Times article:
For Victims of Recession, Patchwork State Aid
New York Times | By JASON DePARLE
May 9, 2009WASHINGTON — As millions of people seek government aid, many for the first time, they are finding it dispensed American style: through a jumble of disconnected programs that reach some and reject others, often for reasons of geography or chance rather than differences in need.
With hundreds of thousands of jobs lost and major industries on the ropes, America’s array of government aid subsidies, including unemployment, insurance, food stamps and housing, is being tested as never before. This is the first in a series of articles examining how the safety net is holding up under the worst economic crisis in decades.
Health care, housing, food stamps and cash — each forms a separate bureaucratic world, and their dictates often collide. State differences make the patchwork more pronounced, and random foibles can intervene, like a computer debacle in Colorado that made it harder to get food stamps and Medicaid.
The result is a hit-or-miss system of relief, never designed to grapple with the pain of a recession so sudden and deep. Aid seekers often find the rules opaque and arbitrary. And officials often struggle to make policy through a system so complex and Balkanized.
Across the country, hard luck is colliding with fine print.
Workers who banked $2,000 in severance pay can get food stamps in South Carolina; their counterparts in North Carolina cannot. Oklahomans who earned $10,000 in six months can collect unemployment if they started work on the 15th of February, May, August or November — but not if they started two weeks later.
When Beverly Johnson of Kosciusko, Miss., lost her job at a Bible college, she took solace in the prospect of jobless benefits. Then Ms. Johnson discovered that as an employee of a religious school she was ineligible for aid. “That was a shock,” she said.
When the recession cost Erika Nieves of Bridgeport, Conn., her job with a wrestling promoter, she did get unemployment benefits. But that caused her to lose a welfare-to-work grant and her child care subsidy. Now Ms. Nieves is months behind on her rent and is job hunting with a 2-year-old. “They took away my aid when I need it the most,” she said.
As a measure of the safety net, The New York Times examined state-by-state enrollment in six federal programs and found large variations in the share of needy helped.
Just 50 percent of people eligible for food stamps receive them in California, compared with 98 percent in Missouri. Nineteen percent of the unemployed get jobless benefits in South Dakota, compared with 67 percent in Idaho.
Fifteen states rank among the top 10 in providing one form of aid and the bottom 10 in another. California ranks second in distributing cash welfare but last in food stamps. South Dakota, last in jobless benefits, is first in subsidized housing.
Aid in states most hit by recession is also scattershot. Michigan’s programs reach a comparatively high share of the needy, while South Carolina’s rank in the middle and Nevada’s reach relatively few. All have double-digit unemployment rates.
“The system for helping Americans in need is very fragmented, and it confuses everyone,” said Theda Skocpol, a political scientist at Harvard. “Some people are covered and some people are not, even though they look like they’re in very similar circumstances.”
This complexity is a challenge for President Obama as he reacts to the economic crisis. The February stimulus act contains more than $100 billion in safety net provisions, but much of the aid consists of financial incentives the states are free to reject. Several governors quickly spurned grants to expand unemployment insurance, for example, saying the move would raise business taxes and kill jobs.
Aid programs spend hundreds of billions of dollars and reach tens of millions of people; the food stamp program alone covers more than one in 10 Americans. Yet the safety net leaves few camps satisfied. Liberals say programs are weak compared with other rich countries and are overly deferential to states. Conservatives fault costs and complexity and warn that aid can do harm.
With generous programs “you could be discouraging people from seeking better jobs,” said Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation.
Both sides, those who want more spending and those who want less, would unite under Mr. Butler’s description of the status quo. “You’ve got this kind of jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t really fit together, ” he said.
Compared with its peers, the United States has always made social policy in ad hoc ways, with voters quicker to call themselves self-reliant and central government more structurally constrained. Even the New Deal was a hodgepodge affair, with Social Security initially omitting about 40 percent of the work force.
Now decades after the Great Society brought a new burst of policymaking, aid programs flow through multiple — and sometimes rivalrous — departmental chains of command. Welfare and Medicaid reside at the Department of Health and Human Services; food stamps at Agriculture; rent subsidies at Housing and Urban Development; unemployment insurance at Labor; and tax credits at Treasury.
Click here to read entire article.
Other worthwhile reading:
McClatchy: Deficits soar even with rosy assumptions in new Obama budget
RedState: Whoops… Entitlement Programs Collapsing Faster than Expected
The Lonely Conservative: Unemployment Hits 8.9%
Hot Air: Unemployment up to 9.4% and White House: No job growth for rest of the year
The LRC Blog: Who’s Hiring During the Bush-Obama Depression?
Moe Lane: White House predicts 3.5% growth by year’s end.
Jane Q. Republican: Obama Saving Or Creating Millions Of Jobs? Not THIS Year and Dr. Obama Working The Scalpel Again
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